debug-adapter-protocol VS flow-storm-debugger

> There's a strange dance of IDEs coming and going, with their idiosyncracies and partial plugins.

The Language Server Protocol [1] is the best thing to happen to text editors. Any editor that speaks it gets IDE features. Now if only they'd adopt the Debug Adapter Protocol [2]...

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

[2] https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/

Wonder if they've got support for Debug Adapter Protocol? https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/

> Debuggers need to do more things

It's true that coming up with an interface for an abstract debugger is harder, but it's not impossible. Microsoft create Debug Adapter Protocol (https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/), which is conceptually similar for LSP. It's not perfect, but covers most basic operations pretty well, while leaving to the debugger to deal with the implementation details.

Most languages also include support for the Debug Adapter Protocol, and Haskell is no exception, so if you are so inclined, you can hook up your favorite editor/IDE and go to town.

They're working on the Debug Adapter Protocol but it doesn't have critical mass/adoption yet. And yeah, I end up having a fair share of dbg!(foo). It's not so bad since dbg!() also returns its value, so you don't have to mess with your code too much.

TL;DR: What would it take to implement a Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)-based step debugger?

RDP is the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol that was in use for decades before VSCode; VSCode's own remoting doesn't use it.

I'd say that, in addition to LSP, the other big thing that came out of VSCode is DAP: https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol.

The most important part is the JDT Languag Server, it will give you the Java tooling for writing code. I think it has DAP support as well, so with a DAP client like nvim-dap you should be able to debug as well.

Tracing debuggers give you the best of both worlds. I've recently started using Flow-storm [0], by @jpmonettas), and it's been quite transformative. You can still easily see the values flowing through your system (better than just "prints"), and it can handle multi-threaded / async scenarios quite nicely. You don't need to manually step through code, you can just "see" your data flow, and when you have loops or some other form of iteration, you can see the data for each pass. Coupling this with a good data visualization tool (such as Portal [1]) really feels like magic. I've been doing Clojure for quite a few years now, and was very happy with my plain REPL-driven workflow, but this is way better.

[0] https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger

[1] https://github.com/djblue/portal

This is another example, a tracing time travel debugger for Clojure https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger

Supports a bunch of stuff described there and more.

Lisps have some good tooling around debugging, for example clojure's flowstorm or common lisp which has built into the language most of what this article is talking about.

There's some good debugging tooling for Clojure as well. A recent entrant is https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger and of course there's the estabilished pretty full featured debugging features in CIDER (Emacs), Calva (VS Code) and Cursive (IntelliJ). And for barebones tracing from REPL there's goo old clojure.tools.trace.

For Emacs there is something already if you use the Emacs integration described here https://github.com/jpmonettas/flow-storm-debugger/tree/flow-docs/editors.